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Friday, December 28, 2012

Every year around this time celebrity (and a lot of
non-celebrity) old folk kick off. I believe that a lot of them leave this
mortal coil around Xmas time because it’s a “good” time to do so — the emotionally
overwhelming notion of another holiday season is deftly avoided, and the end of
the year is a great place to call a halt to the proceedings — think of the
ailing George Burns and Bob Hope somehow both living until 100, and then giving
up the ghost within two months of that milestone birthday. This year we lost
two great character people in the span of a day, the first being TV everyman Jack
Klugman.

Klugman was a hearty, driven soul who kept active after
losing a vocal cord to cancer in 1989. He performed on stage (most notably with his Odd Couple partner Tony Randall), in movies, and on TV. The only thing that
suffered a bit was his work in comedies — he was still a damned good comic actor,
but it was discomforting to laugh at a person with a scratchy, faint voice (the
1993 TV movie The Odd Couple: Together Again included
Klugman’s real-life triumph over throat cancer as one of its plot points, thereby
making it a hard sell as a rollicking comedy).

He did an impressive amount of work on stage and in the
movies, but he will forever be enshrined as both Oscar Madison and as the
skeptical medical examiner Quincy. He won three Emmys for his TV work (two for The
Odd Couple and one for a guest-starring role on The
Defenders), but is also well-remembered for his starring roles in
four episodes of the Twilight Zone (and six Naked
City eps).

Born to Russian-Jewish parents and raised in Philadelphia,
Klugman worked (after serving in WWII) in the Golden Age of dramatic TV,
appearing in both the shows that highlighted sterling performances and playwriting
(Actor’s Studio, Goodyear Playhouse),
and the aforementioned anthology series — although he guested on
Suspense, Big Town, and Inner
Sanctum before he journeyed to the Twilight Zone
and Naked City. He
claimed his proudest moment was on Producers’ Showcase in
1955, when he had a supporting role in The Petrified Forest
with Bogart, Bacall, and Henry Fonda.

I will confess to having been terribly bored by Quincy,
as I was by the very similar Quinn Martin productions of that same era (The Streets
of San Francisco being an exception). However, I loved the
Odd Couple TV series and continue to love it after all these
years — it is the ONLY example that I can cite of a network comedy getting appreciably
better season by season (esp. in regards to the quantum leap the show took after
its first, extremely drab and laughtracked, season).

My favorite thing about Klugman’s acting is that (especially
when he did comedy) Jack talked with his hands. This is commonly thought of as
a Italian-American trait (“Why aren’t there any Italian dogs? Can’t find anyone
who can bark with their hands!” — George Carlin). It’s really an ethnic
American trait that can be found in Italians, Jews, Germans, the Irish, the
Poles, Puerto Ricans, and pretty much anyone who grew up in an urban area in the mid-20th Century. As Oscar Madison, Klugman spent a good deal of time trying to get
things across to Felix with his hands, emphasizing and punctuating his
statements as he spoke.

The character of Oscar Madison is supposed to be the biggest
slob in the world, but he’s not a lazy lout. In fact, that was what made
Klugman’s performance as the character so special — while Randall as Felix was
supposed to be the more cultured half of the two, we knew that Oscar was actually
the creative one. He wasn’t acquainted with high culture, but he pounded out sports
columns on his typewriter for his bread and butter, and seemed to be capable of
being a novelist, if only he could overcome his writer’s block.

The other thoroughly winning aspect of Klugman’s excellent
work on the show was that, despite the fact that Felix was supposed to be the “sensitive”
half of the duo, Oscar actually supplied the “heart” of the program. Most of the times that there was a complex emotion to be displayed on The Odd
Couple, Klugman handled it, and did so wonderfully. This is no knock
against Tony Randall, who was a superb comic actor — Klugman, however, was
clearly the better dramatic actor and handled sentimental moments with no trace
of mawkishness.

Finally, aside from his acting work, Klugman publicly took political stances in
his lifetime. In one such instance, at the urging of his brother, he spotlighted the concept of “orphaned
diseases” (diseases that pharmaceutical companies had abandoned because they didn't yield a profit) on an episode
of Quincy, and he subsequently testified to a congressional
subcommittee looking into the matter.

His presence got the subcommittee’s hearing news coverage, and
thus helped get a bill passed (the “Orphan Drug Act of 1983”) that offered drug makers
incentives to do trials on drugs for diseases that had been “forgotten.”
Klugman’s place in this campaign (including a *second* Quincy
episode written by Jack and his brother to shame obstructionist Senator Orrin
Hatch) are detailed in this clip from The Rachel Maddow Show.

At 85, Klugman became involved in a second campaign called “First
Freedom,” an interfaith initiative intended to get candidates to move away from
infusing their religious beliefs into their policies. Here he argues for “sound
science… and not religious dogma”:

In this spot for the campaign, he argues that it is the
patient’s right to choose how he/she should live or die:

Here’s a clip from the Defenders episode
for which he won an Emmy. The plot is a sharp one about show business
blacklisting (which was occurring up through the early Sixties). E.G. Marshall
and Robert Reed were the show’s stars:

Klugman appeared on pretty much every conceivable type of TV
program. He did the rounds of the game shows (while one of the best-remembered
Odd Couple eps found Felix and Oscar on Password). Here he is on Match Game with
his then-wife Brett Somers, raisin’ a ruckus:

There were countless great moments on the Odd
Couple series, but since the series is in syndication (it’s about to
enter the schedule on the MeTV network) , here is a series of amusing outtakes
from the show (apparently from the DVD that was sold with Klugman’s book about
his friendship with Randall):

One of the odder artifacts from Klugman’s TV career: his
guest-starring appearance in the Sammy Davis comedy pilot film Poor
Devil (1973), which finds Sammy playing a demonic assistant to
Lucifer (Christopher Lee) who’s out to claim the soul of a gambler (Klugman):

As I noted above, much as I liked Klugman I was terribly
bored by Quincy. One of the most famous shows in the series and the most compulsively watchable one (for people of my age group) was
the infamous “punk episode.” It was a sublimely corny message drama about the
dangers of punk music. Here is the TV ad for the episode. This short set of clips sets up the premise and shows Jack
trying to convince the punks he’s only trying to help:

A bit more of the scene that sets up the plot (with a very
concerned Anita Gillette) and the punk club that Quincy visits:

A clip of the punk show and slam-dancing that Jack
witnesses:

Perhaps the finest moment in pure silliness that Klugman and
Randall were involved in was the tie-in album for the Odd
Couple series, The Odd Couple Sing. Here is the
best track on the LP, the duo taking on Carly Simon’s classic of vague
identification, “You’re So Vain”:

Monday, December 24, 2012

It's
everywhere this time of year – Christmas music that is. As I write
this, only 24 hours remain until the holiday is here and then it's
GONE, so I will get straight to the point – if you are looking for
non-brain-damaged, unfamiliar Yuletide- (and Solstice-)themed music, songs with a
brain, a heart, and in many cases, a “demented” soul, look no
further than the following four recommendations.

First
of all, there is the sublimely strange melange of music served up by
the DJ known as KBC on his “Bitslap” podcast. His themed episodes
are all wonderful, but one of his specialties is uncovering VERY rare
and often uniquely oddball Xmas music. So feast on the offerings
available on his podcast, found here. As of today he has four current
Xmas shows and a number of items from years past.

Now
we move on to the music-videos of three tunes I really do love, for
different reasons. The first is a non-mawkish but beautifully sentimental item composed and
performed by the Australian musical comedian Tim Minchin. Tim is an atheist
whose Xmas tune celebrates the holiday from a secular perspective, arguing that the real crux of the season is
being with family and friends. It's a smart and sweet tune.

On
to the seasonal cheer. I've written a few times before on this blog
about Sherwin Sleeves, the brainchild of writer-performer Sean
Hurley. Sherwin is a man of many talents and a sublimely gravely
voice. That voice has been featured in two very wonderful Xmas stories, the
first being “The Christmas Skater,” a beautifully written piece
of radio that can be heard here.

The second seasonal adventure is one that I have just listened to today for the first time. It is the innovative, award-winning play Whisper, Pray, Make Room, which finds Sean as a modern-day Scrooge who happens
to work as a talk-radio host. The "ghosts" reach him in the voice of
his callers. As I've noted before on these pages, Hurley is a really
top-notch writer whose works are true Internet treasures. Check out his terrific "radio theater" stories with Sleeves at his Atoms, Motion and the Void site.

Oh,
and here is Sleeves'extremely catchy Xmas tune, which appears at the end of Whisper... (but was written before the play was created). It's
short and is worthy of repeat plays.

And
finally a song that belongs not to Xmas, but to the original holiday that occurred around this time of year, the Solstice. Singer-songwriter Andy
Ditzler's tune is a wonderful earworm with a chorus that's
catchy as hell. The reason I recommend it heartily is not only that
the song is upbeat and joyous, but because Ditzler was lucky enough
to have an underground legend, Funhouse favorite George Kuchar, shoot
his music-video.

Funhouse
viewers and readers of this blog will know that I LOVE George's work
(and that of his brother Mike), and this music-vid (shot while George
was teaching at the San Franciso Art Institute) has some imagery that
only he could've come up with. Santa, dinosaurs, and Halloween decorations – the
nine-year-old in me cheers.

Speaking
of those of other faiths, if you'd like to hear three novelty Xmas
items recorded by Jewish comics (Jerry Lewis, Marty Feldman, and
Albert Brooks), then check out my Xmas-music entry from last year.

Saturday, December 15, 2012

The best political humor is also
pungent social commentary. This clip from the British
humorist-columnist Charlie Brooker's razor-sharp series
Newswipe from 2009 finds Brooker discussing a
recent incident in which a German teen perpetrated a mass shooting at
a school.

Brooker's programs analyze the media
(news programs in particular), with him making sarcastic comments
from the sanctity of his living room – the ultimate revenge of the
couch potato. The object of his shows is certainly to make fun of
media coverage of major news stories, but he's willing to sacrifice
the jokes to make serious points, as he did in this instance.

Here he intercuts sensationalist
footage from 24-hour news channels with an extremely pointed
interview with Dr. Park Dietz, the forensic psychiatrist who has
testified at several major murder trials, concerning the ways in
which the mass media can cover mass shootings and NOT inspire similar
incidents in the future.

The things he says may seem obvious to
most of us sentient humans – do not do 24/7 coverage of the
incident, do not make the body count the lead story, do not make the
killer an antihero – but it does serve as a short list of the ways
in which news nets do help perpetuate this cycle of violence.

Even
the left-leaning networks that decry the violence and are seemingly
in favor of gun control, like MSNBC, were doing “wall to wall
coverage” of the Connecticut shooting yesterday, when there was
absolutely no new news to report – in so doing they helped spread
false info about the identity of the killer.

The clip speaks for itself, and sadly
will be topical for a long time to come:

Friday, December 7, 2012

I've been proselytizing about British alternative
comedy on this blog and the Funhouse TV show for about three years at this
point, and one of my favorite things about following it is “connecting the
dots” and discovering even more brilliant standups whom I'd never heard of, but
whose material puts the alterna-souls over here in the shade. The only problem
with following this stuff “from a distance” is that it's highly unlikely these
gents and ladies will make it over here. This last factor is counteracted,
though, by the fact that the work of these comics can be usually be seen in
profusion on YouTube and obtained on DVDs from the UK.

Such is the case with Arnold Brown, a “godfather” of
British alternative comedy. I first heard about him when he was cited as an
influence by Richard Herring and Stewart Lee in interviews. It's quite
obvious why the former Fist of Fun partners looks up to him:
Brown is a quiet, soft-spoken standup who regularly turns his jokes on their
side, sometimes deconstructing and toying with them as he's telling them. His
sarcastic edge is wonderfully lethal, and is enriched by his Scottish burr.

A little bit of history: Brown began his standup
career in the late Seventies at the Comedy Store in London while still working
as an accountant. He became a regular performer at the legendary Comic Strip
club after it opened in 1980. There he performed alongside the club's other
mainstays, which included The Young Ones set and French and
Saunders.

Brown appears in the 1981 short film by Julien Temple
called “The Comic Strip.” He is seen onstage doing his act from 1:25-4:15 in
this section of the film:

His laidback stage presence counterpoints the
weirdness of some of his remarks (“I come from Glasgow... why not?”). He was
the exact opposite of the spirited (and superb) Alexei Sayle and the broadly
comic Mayall and Edmondson. Through the alternative “cred” he built up doing
his act at the Comic Strip, he eventually wound up opening for bands across the
UK, something he discusses in one of the extras on his new DVD – more on that
below.

From the Eighties to the present day, Brown has kept
busy as a standup, an actor in both film and television, and a commercial
voiceover artist. He could be seen by American viewers playing a psychiatrist
in Bill Forsyth's Comfort and Joy (1984), and he also played
different small roles during the run of The Young Ones.

Funhouse TV viewers will have seen him guest-starring
as Stew's veteran granddad in clips I showed from the “Crisps” episode of
Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle. He also shows up in an episode
of the caustic comedian/magician Jerry Sadowitz's The Pall Bearer's
Revue (1992) – although you'll find no clips from that online, as the
brilliant and very explosive Sadowitz (another colleague of
Brown’s who’s his polar opposite) is adamant about not allowing
any performance footage of himself online (he makes the
reclusive Daniel Kitson seem like Russell Brand).

Here is another vintage clip of a younger (read:
middle-aged) Brown performing his unique material on an unidentified variety show:

As the years have passed, Brown’s delivery has gotten
even more refined and laidback. Like a confident magician (should we raise the
name of Sadowitz again?), he often peels back the layers of his jokes, as he
does here in one of my favorite bits of his:

A short clip with Arnold offering his wry take on
quotidian comedy (“pretended empathy with audience…”):

Brown can finally be experienced in the U.S., thanks
to the folks at Go Faster Stripe, the Welsh mail-order DVD company that has
done a terrific job of preserving the acts of both younger and older UK alternative
comics, and making them available at a low price in supplement-laden releases.
Befitting his act, Brown’s disc Jokes I Have Known, peels
back the layers of his act, as he is seen alternately onstage and in a living room home alone,
seated, performing straight to the camera.

At first, I thought the effect of intercutting the
two different spaces was jarring, as if a DVD extra has crept into the main
program. As the disc goes on, however, you realize that Brown is proud of his
material and wants to communicate directly with the home viewer. As Stewart Lee
has done in his Comedy Vehicle, Brown is acknowledging the
big difference between performing for a nightclub audience and trying to entertain
the TV viewer.

But all the above is theoretical, and this is comedy
(which, as Steve Allen noted, can never make a person laugh once they’ve
analyzed it). Brown has worked as a writer for other comedians, and that comes
through in Jokes I Have Known: he has his own distinctly
mellow-yet-sarcastic delivery, but the jokes themselves do not depend on his
persona, they’re just funny.

He also doesn’t shrink from making his age a subject
for laughs — at one point he stops, walks to the rear of the stage, and
consults a legal pad to see if he’s left out any routines he wanted to do. He
then remarks that the home viewer will never see him do that, it will be cut
(but of course it wasn’t, intentionally).

At one point, he casually slides in as a side-note to
bolster a joke the fact that he is 76 years old — with most entertainers
(nearly all?), that would be a sad attempt to garner applause, but Brown uses
it instead to shore up his slow-moving-but-fast-thinking comic persona.

As is always the case with Go Faster Stripe releases,
the disc includes interesting extras, the main one being a very funny mutual
interview that Brown carried on with fellow “mellow older gent” comic Norman
Lovett (their GFS DVDs were shot back to back).

In the interest of *full
disclosure* (and with great pride), I will note that, yes, the other extra is a
“Consumer Guide” episode of the Funhouse TV show in which I reviewed three terrific
GFS releases (Simon Munnery’s Hello, Nine Lessons
and Carols for a Godless Xmas, and Stewart Lee’s 90s
Comedian).

Two samples of the Arnold Brown DVD are available on
YT. The first one shows the counterpoint between Arnold doing jokes onstage and
at home (btw, fellow Yanks: “Strepsils” is a British lozenge):

And possibly the SINGLE BEST example of Brown’s
wonderful deadpan to be found online, his piece on the potential desirability
of sheep:

Thursday, December 6, 2012

A quick DA salute — I know, I know, I missed a bunch
of 2012 departures, I hope to catch up soon — to the great Dave Brubeck, who
died this week at 92. I was lucky enough to see Mr. Brubeck at Carnegie Hall
back in 2003 (free tix from a friend, the only way for me to score great seats at that venuesince Harry
Chapin left us), and it was a terrific concert, with a master pianist plyin’
his trade at the tender age of 83.

The obits ran through the details of his landmark
life — son of a cattle rancher, he ditched working with cows to play the piano;
formed an integrated quartet that played college campuses throughout the Fifties
(if the deans found out they had a black member and told them the main stage
wasn’t open to them, they’d play the cafeteria instead); upon the quartet
breaking up in ’67, he devoted himself to writing concertos, oratorios,
ballets, and cantatas.

But what was this oh-so-calm-and-dedicated musician
best known for? Creating two of the melodies that we have come to know as “signifying”
the cooler side of the Fifties in films and TV episodes. They both were
featured on the 1959 million-selling album (first jazz LP to do so; by now it’s
sold two million) Time Out, and you KNOW them even if you
can’t name ‘em.

The first one, the perfect “Take Five,” was a hit
single that reached #25 on the pop chart. The notion of a jazz instrumental hit
(that was not a movie theme) in the post-big band era was a rarity indeed, but “Take
Five” is just so infectious that it actually made jukeboxes around
the country. It now is THE go-to song for movies and TV eps that want to convey
the hipper side of the Fifties (even though it was released just as the decade
was ending).

Here is the Dave Brubeck Quartet performing the song
on German TV in 1966. On the sax is Paul Desmond, who wrote the song and willed
the royalties from it to the American Red Cross (who reportedly receive
$100,000 a year in “Take Five” money).

The other, super-evocative piece that has been used
in several films depicting the "beatnik era" is “Blue Rondo a la Turk,” the opening track from the same
album. Here the Quartet perform the track on a TV show called The
Lively Ones on July 25, 1962:

“Blue Rondo…” has been used in a LOT of film and TV
shows trying to evoke the Fifties, my personal favorite being Paul
Mazursky’s charming Next Stop,
Greenwich Village. Mazursky clearly felt the tune was emblematic of
an era, so he shifted it chronologically — Next Stop takes
place in 1953, but the Time Out LP didn’t materialize until ’59.

As a bonus, here’s a song that doesn’t show up on
movie and TV soundtracks, but is equally ear-worm-ish and was “visualized” via
dance on an unidentified Sixties variety show. Here, kats and kitties, is the “Unsquare
Dance”: